Our
discussion kicks off a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea (TD) designed, built, and commercialized a vast cloud infrastructure. The
first part of our series addresses the rationale and business
opportunity for TD to create their cloud-services portfolio built on VMware. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Stay
with us now to learn more about implementing the best cloud technology
to deliver and commercialize an adaptive and reliable cloud services
ecosystem. Here to share their story on this journey, we're joined by Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome Adam.

Adam Beavis: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Gardner:
Why cloud services for your
consulting and business customers now? Have they been asking for it? Has
the market shifted in some way that led you to begin this journey?

Gardner: Why then have you looked at moving toward cloud services as a commercial offering, rather than going yourself to a public cloud and then availing yourself of their services? Why build it yourself?

Beavis:
We reviewed all the possibilities and looked at moving to some of the
larger cloud providers, but we've got a strong skill set, a strong
heritage, and good relationships with our customers, and they forced our
hand in many ways to move down that path.

They were concerned about telcos
looking after some of their cloud services. They really wanted to
maintain the relationship that they had with us. So we reviewed it and
understood that, because of the skill sets we have and the experience in
this area, it would work both commercially and then relationship-wise.
The best move for us was to leverage the existing relationships we have
with the vendors and build out our own cloud.

Gardner: So who are these eager customers? Could you describe them? Do they fall into a particular category, like a small to medium-size business (SMB) type of clientele? Is it a vertical industry? Where is the sweet spot in the market?

No sweet spot

Beavis:
That’s probably the one thing that surprised me the most. As we've been
out talking to customers and selling the cloud, there really is no
sweet spot. Organizations that you talk to will be doing it for
different reasons. Some of them might be doing it for environmental
insurance reasons, because having their data center in their building is
costing them money, and there are now viable opportunity to move it
out.

But if I were to identify one or two, the first one would be independent software vendors (ISVs).
Cloud solutions are bringing to ISVs something they've looked for for a
long time, and that’s the ability to run test and development environments.
Once they've done that, they can host their applications out of a
service provider and not have to worry about the underlying
infrastructure, which is something, as a application developer, they're
not interested in.

So we're seeing them, and we're working with quite a few. One, an Oracle
partner, will actually run their tests in their environments in a
cloud, and then be able to deliver those services back to some of their
customers. In other cases they'll run up the development in their cloud
and then import that to an on-premise cloud afterward.

The
other area is with SMBs. We're certainly seeing them, for a financial
reasons, want to shift to cloud. It's the same old story of OPEX versus CAPEX, reduced budgets, and trying to do more with less.

The
cloud is now in a position where it can offer that to SMB customers. So
we're seeing great opportunities appear, where not only are we taking
their infrastructure into the cloud, but also adding on top of that managed-service capability, where we will be managing all the way up to the application.

We see us being able to provide it to anyone, from a small reseller to an ISV, someone who develops their own applications.

Gardner:
Based on this mixture of different types of uses, it sounds like you're
going to be able to grow your offerings right along with what this
market demands. Perhaps some of those ISVs might be looking for a platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
direction, others more of a managed services, just for specific
applications. Was that important for you to have that sort of Swiss Army
knife for cloud advancement?

Beavis: Exactly right, Dana. Each one is addressing a different pain point. For example, some of them are coming to us for disaster recovery (DR)
as a service, because the cost of renewing their DR site or managing or
putting that second site out is too expensive. Others, as you said, are
just looking for a platform to develop applications on. So the whole
PaaS concept is something near and dear to us on our roadmap.

Each one continues to evolve, and it's usually the customers that start to drive you as a cloud provider to look at your own service catalog. That’s probably something that’s quite exciting -- how quickly you need to evolve as a service provider.
Because it's still quite a new area for a lot of people, and customers
do ask for varying things that they expect the cloud to be or what a
cloud is. We're constantly evolving and looking at new offerings to add
into our service catalog.

Gardner: In my
introduction I mentioned a cloud-of-clouds ecosystem. Does that make
sense? Is that the sort of goal that you are ultimately going to reach
with your journey?

Beavis: It definitely is. We
see it being more than just one offering in our eyes. We see us being
able to provide it to anyone, from a small reseller to an ISV, someone
who develops their own applications. Or, it's someone who works
specifically with applications and they're not just interested anymore
in running their own infrastructure on their site or caring for it. They
just want to provide that platform for their developers to be able to
work hassle-free.

Gardner: So this means that
you've got to come up with an infrastructure that can support many
different type of uses, grow, scale, and increase adaptability to the
market. What were some of the requirements, when you started looking at
the vendors that you were going to partner with to create this cloud
offering?

Understanding customers' needsBeavis: The first thing that was important
for us was, as you said, understanding our customers’ needs initially
and then matching that to what they required. Once we had that, those
words you mentioned, scale and everything, had to come into play. Also
the cost to build these things certainly doesn’t come cheap. So we had
to make sure we could use the existing resources we had.

We really went in the end with the VMware
product, because we have existing skill sets in that area. We knew we
would have a lot of support, with their being a tier-1 vendor and us being a tier-1 partner for them. We needed someone that could provide us with that
support from both a services perspective, sales, marketing, and really
come on the journey with us to build that cloud.

And then obviously our other vendors underneath, like EMC, who are also incredibly supportive of us, integrate very well with those products, and Cisco as well.

It had to be something that we could rapidly build, I won't say out of the box,
because it’s a lot that goes around building a cloud, but something
that we knew had a strong roadmap and was familiar to all our customers
as well.

The move to cloud is something that is new to
them, it's stressful, and they're wondering how to do it. In Australia,
99 percent of customers have some sort of VMware
in their data center. To be able to move to a platform that they were
familiar with and had used in the past makes a big difference, rather
than saying, "You're moving to cloud, and here is a whole new platform,
interface, and something that you've never seen before."

Needless to say, we're very good partners with some of the other
providers as well. We did review them all, but it was a maturity thing
and also a vision thing.

The story of the hybrid cloud was something we sat down and saw had a lot of legs: The
opportunity for people to stick their toe in the water and get used to
being in the cloud environment. And VMware’s hybrid cloud
model, connecting your on-premise into the public cloud, was also a big
win for us. That’s really a very strong go-to-market for us.

Gardner: As a systems integrator for some time, you're very familiar with the other virtualization offerings in the market. Was there anything in particular that led you away from them and more toward VMware?

Beavis: Not really. It was definitely a maturity thing. We remember when Paul Maritz
got on stage four years ago and defined the cloud operating system. The
whole industry followed after that. VMware led in this path. So being a
market leader certainly helped.

Needless to say,
we're very good partners with some of the other providers as well. We
did review them all, but it was a maturity thing and also a vision
thing. The vision of a software-defined datacenter really came into play as we were building Cloud 2.0 and that was a big winner for us. That vision that they have now around that is certainly something that we believe in as well.

Gardner: Of course, they've announced new and important additions to their vCloud Suite,
and a lot of that seems to focus on folks like yourself who need to
create clouds as a business to be able to measure, meter, build, manage
access, privacy, and security issues. Was there anything about the
vCloud Suite that attractive you in terms of being able to run the cloud
as a business itself?

Product integration

Beavis:
The fact it was packing stuff as a suite was a big one for us. The
integration of the products now is something that’s happening a lot more
rapidly, and as a provider, that’s what we like to see. The concept of
needing different modules for billings, operations, even going back 12
months ago, made it quite difficult.

In the last 12 months with the Suite, it has come a long way. We've used the component around Chargeback, vCenter Operations Management, and Capacity Management. The concept now of software-defined security, firewalls,
and networking, has become very, very exciting for us, to be able to
all of a sudden manage that through a single console, rather than having
many different point solutions doing different things. As a service
provider that’s committed to that VMware product, we find it very, very
important.

Gardner: Margins can be a little
tricky with this business. As you say, you had a lot of investment in
this. How do you know when you are succeeding? Is there a benchmark that
you set for yourself that would say, "We know we're doing this well
when "blank?" Or is this a bit more of a crawl, walk, run approach to
this overall cloud business?

Beavis: Obviously
that comes with a lot of the backend work we're doing. We take a lot of
time. It’s probably the most important part. Before we even go and build
the cloud, it’s getting all that right. You know your direction. You
know what your forecast needs to be. You know what numbers you need to
hit. We certainly have numbers and targets in mind.

That’s from a financial perspective, but also customers are coming into the cloud, because just like physical to virtual, people will come, initially, just with small environment and then they'll continue to grow.

If you provide good service within your cloud, and they see that risk
reduced, cost reduced, and it’s more comfortable, they will continue to
move workloads into your cloud

If you provide good
service within your cloud, and they see that risk reduced, cost
reduced, and it’s more comfortable, they will continue to move workloads
into your cloud, which obviously increases your bottom line.

Initially
it’s not just, "Let’s go out and sell as much as we can to one or two
customers, whatever it might be." It’s really getting as many logos into
the cloud as we can, and then really work on those relationships,
building up that trust, and then over time start to migrate more and
more workloads into the cloud.

Gardner: Adam,
help us understand for those listening who might want to start exploring
your services, when do these become available? When are you announcing
them, and is there any roadmap that you might be able to tease us with a
little bit about what might be coming in the future?

Beavis:
We've got Cloud 1.0 running at the moment, which is a cloud where we
provide cloud services to customers. We have the automation level that
we are putting in Cloud 2.0. Our backup services, where people no longer
have to worry about tapes and things on site, backup as a service where
they can just point to our data center and backup files, is available
now.

Also DR as a service is probably our biggest
number one seller cloud service at the moment, where people who don’t
want to run those second sites, can just deploy or move those workloads
over into our data center, and we can manage their DR for them.

New cloud suite

But there's a big one we're talking about. We're on stage at vForum next Wednesday, November 14, here in Australia, launching our new cloud suite built on VMware vCloud Director 5.1.

Then on the roadmap, the areas that are starting to pop up now are things like desktop as a service. We're exploring quite heavily with big data on the table, business intelligence
as a service, and the ability for us to do something with all that data
that we're collecting from our customers. When we talk about IT as a
service, that's lifting us up to that next level again.

As
I said earlier, it's continuously changing and new ideas evolve, and
that’s the great thing working with an innovative company. There are
always plenty of people around driving new concepts and new ideas into
the cloud business.

Gardner: It's very exciting,
and we look forward to learn more. We've been talking about how leading
Australian IT services provider Thomas Duryea Consulting has made a
successful journey to cloud computing.

It's continuously changing and new ideas evolve, and that’s the great thing working with an innovative company.

Our
discussion today kicks off a three-part series on how TD designed,
built, and commercialized an adaptive and reliable cloud services
ecosystem. The next part of our series will delve more deeply into the
how and what, rather than focusing, as we did today, on more of the
business rationale for this cloud infrastructure journey.

With
that, I'd like to thank our guest for being here on BriefingsDirect
today, Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea
Consulting in Melbourne, Australia. Thanks so much, Adam.

Beavis: Thank you, Dana. Absolute pleasure.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience for joining and listening and invite them to come back next time.

This
is Dana Gardner, your host and moderator, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions. Thanks so much again for joining. Bye for now.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has
escalated cloud infrastructure development to provide a portfolio of new public cloud services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.